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Dinnerware With Corners, Making a Point

THE shift was so gradual and subtle, it hardly registered. Then the geometry of it all hit me at a recent meal.

At the start of a dinner at Perry St., the amuse-bouche, a celery root soup with a hidden layer of warm maple syrup, arrived in a square espresso cup on a square saucer. Then course after course appeared on square plates and in square bowls, and when I looked down at the sleek and boxy little ensemble I thought, When did this happen?

How did espresso cups in New York come to have corners? Why have restaurants all over the city, both acclaimed and cozy, decided that 500 years of round plates were enough? And what does it all mean?

Because a square plate has meaning. It is the latest in a series of signifiers -- like cheese trolleys or severe flower arrangements or wine lists with selections from countries you didn't know grew grapes -- that let diners know what sort of restaurant they are in. It indicates caliber, or at least aspiration. A square plate is a design element that has nothing to do with flavor, but it raises expectations for the food. It says, You're about to be dazzled.

All the plates and bowls at Perry St. are square. (The teapot, used to pour broth at table side, is a jaunty trapezoid.) The plates, by Chomette, were spotted by Jean-Georges Vongerichten in London, and they have a clean, spare elegance and the faintest handmade quality. They suit the serene dining room and the modern food. You couldn't imagine a better stage for Grilled Black Bass With Ruby Grapefruit Juice and Caramelized Radishes than a square bowl.

Perry St.'s devotion to the form is unusual. Most restaurants with square plates keep them at the edges of the meal, for appetizers or desserts. But a majority of New York restaurants at the higher end use them in some way. In an informal survey of the city's 50 most celebrated establishments, 40 were found to have square plates.

At first it seemed that the square-plate restaurants embrace an iconoclastic kind of cooking. Le Bernardin, Daniel, Jean Georges and Per Se do, but Alain Ducasse does not. Aquavit, the Biltmore Room, Craft, Cru and Town do; Chanterelle, the Four Seasons and Peter Luger Steak House do not. But the theory does not hold up. A Voce and Thor do, but so does La Grenouille; BLT Fish and Falai don't. Bar Masa does, for two of its appetizers; Masa doesn't. Blue Hill at Stone Barns does; Blue Hill doesn't.

"There is no rhyme or reason," said Dan Barber, the chef and an owner of both Blue Hill restaurants, trying to account for the discrepancy. "I want to say we use square plates at Stone Barns because the fields are square, but I think I'm pushing it."

Mr. Barber did say that the modesty of traditional plates fits Blue Hill, in Greenwich Village. His intention with Blue Hill, he said, is to "underpromise and overdeliver." And a square plate might promise too much.

It is difficult to say when square plates first appeared on restaurant tables. Some say they migrated from midcentury Scandinavia, others from midcentury California. The strongest case by anecdote is that the plates, in use in Japan for centuries, came into use along with fusion cooking. According to Holli Roberts of the Korin Japanese Trading Corporation, the most common plate for grilled fish in Japan is a rectangle.

David Burke remembers using them at the River Café in the 1980's; Eric Ripert saw his first one at Cello in the mid-1990's; in 1996 Iacopo Falai ate off a square plate at La Maison de Marc Veyrat in Annecy, France, possibly the first restaurant to put them into regular use.

Bernardaud, the storied Limoges porcelain maker, does a brisk trade with high-end restaurants and hotels. (If you peek at the underside of a plate at the Fat Duck near London, L'Atelier de Joël Robuchon in Paris or Jean Georges in New York, you will find its insignia.) Michel Bernardaud, the company's president, recalled over the phone that it made its first square plate in 1995 at the request of the eccentric Mr. Veyrat.

"He has a signature dish -- duck liver served in two versions, one cold and one warm -- and so we designed a rectangular tray with two square plates," Mr. Bernardaud said. "One square would come from the fridge and the other from the oven."

Now this sort of side-by-side eating is familiar. The restaurant Daniel uses a pair of square Bernardaud plates for its Duo of Yellowfin Tuna, one with marinated raw tuna, the second with tuna seared a la plancha. For Alto, the ambitious Italian restaurant, the chef, Scott Conant, chose plates that encourage a linear approach.

"When you're taking something familiar and expanding on that familiarity, the presentation is very important," Mr. Conant said. "Especially with Italian food. Italian food has always been known as a certain thing, and my goal is to push it a little bit. Some of it is familiar, but what you get from the presentation is that it's moved far beyond what you'd assume is Italian."

Alto's selection of plates is an inventive assortment: squares and ovals and something that looks like a painter's palette stretched out by a taffy machine. When served with plates like these, you are primed for a new culinary experience before you have tasted the food.

Few diners realize how much thought, effort and capital go into a table setting. For a diner, a plate is a vessel. Soon it's a messy vessel, and the diner wants it taken away.

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But it took Blue Hill at Stone Barns a full year to decide on the right square plate. And for restaurants like Daniel, where different forms have specific roles -- the Slow Baked Grouper Grenobloise gets a square, while the Pan Roasted Dover Sole With a Marcona Almond Emulsion is in a shallow bowl -- not only do the chefs need to buy multiple plates, but they need to find space for them in kitchens that are already cramped.

Per Se has a staggering variety of plates, 85 in all. Not one is repeated during the nine-course chef's tasting menu, and most are custom made by Raynaud for Per Se and the French Laundry. Per Se uses some squares, but the Raynaud plates are round; that is, the overall form is a circle, but for diversity's sake the inset where the food is placed can be any of a number of shapes: oval, almond and, yes, square. The sixth course is meat, usually on a round plate with a rectangle in the middle.

"When I started in this business it was very conservative," said Paolo Novello, assistant general manager at Per Se. "Now it's the chef's food that influences the plates. The order is, First come the ingredients, then the dish, then you make the plate."

But only the most privileged restaurants have the clout to design their own tableware. The rest fit their food to the plate, and some walk a well-trod path with their squares. A terrine of foie gras, for instance, is a popular match for a square because it, too, is square. Pastry chefs are particularly enamored of the shape, and at some restaurants desserts are brought out in a pageant of squares and rectangles.

Other foods don't look so good. To serve a familiar dish like roast chicken and mashed potatoes on a square plate feels like overkill, even if the chicken is a blue foot. The same might be said for steak.

"I can't deal with a sirloin on a square plate," Mr. Burke said by phone from Chicago, where he was opening David Burke's Primehouse. "Square plates are for artistic presentations, and I'm sorry, steak isn't an artistic presentation. Though it's a beautiful thing." There are square plates at David Burke and Donatella, but there will be none at his steakhouse.

While square plates may be increasingly popular in restaurants, they have yet to take off in the home. Bernardaud now sells its Fusion White line to the public, but the design tends to be the second, or even third, set of porcelain for a household.

The Moss store on Greene Street has an extensive selection of tableware as varied as Royal Copenhagen's exquisite Blue Fluted pattern and the Conduit Group's Upstate Collection, a series of unremarkable photographs of semirural New York glazed onto ceramic plates. But there is only one square plate, and it's a part of a set.

The omission is not an oversight: Moss is as much an arbiter of taste as it is a shop. "Square plates try too hard," said Murray Moss, an owner. "Not to reduce it, but there's a sense of globalization in that anything too regional is thought of as pedestrian.

"The fashion of food is to be highly experimental at the cost of being regional, and square dishes are the cue that suddenly you're transported to someplace more exotic. I'm not so interested in a large square plate. I'm not so interested when a meal takes you on a tour around in the world in three courses."

Mr. Moss and two partners will soon open Centovini, a wine bar with rustic Italian food, served on Vecchio Ginori, a design first manufactured in 1735 by Richard Ginori. The plates are round.

Sarah Coffin, curator of the exhibition "Feeding Desire: Design and Tools of the Table, 1500-2005," which opens at the Cooper-Hewitt in May, is dismissive of the popularity of square plates.

"There are several reasons why plates have been round for 500 years," said Ms. Coffin, an expert on china as well as silverware. A round plate was easier to produce, she said, and a corner is a difficult shape from which to eat, "especially if it's a deeper dish, and earlier plates were deep because early food was stews."

She also considers a square plate "extremely unfriendly" to the diner and the place setting. "You can place utensils easily on either side," she said, "but a glass will chip against the plate, and a diner is likely to catch a sleeve on the corner. A rounded surface is much easier to maneuver around. With round plates, climbing into a banquette is much more friendly."

Even among converts there is a backlash. Mr. Ripert has four square plates in his arsenal at Le Bernardin but is using them less.

"Square plates are not convivial to me," he said. "We're using this plate for the geometry of it. The good thing of a dish like that is that you define the rules, but you have to sacrifice the sauce aspect. A square plate has too much surface, and the sauce goes everywhere. It's better in a round plate because it's more contained. And I like to cook with sauce."

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A version of this article appears in print on April 26, 2006, on Page F00012 of the National edition with the headline: Dinnerware With Corners, Making a Point. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe